MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 
ISTIAN SCIENCE ? 




Class 

Book L 



Copyright N?_ 



COPTOIGKT DEPOSIT. 



MUST PROTESTANTISM 
ADOPT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 

A CHURCHMAN'S VIEW 



BY 

THE REV. J.WINTHROP HEGEMAN, Ph.D. 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

MCMXIV 



3X^4-3 



OCT 171114 



COPYRIGHT. 1913. 1914 BY HARPER & BROTHERS 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
PUBLISHED OCTOBER. 1914 



>CI,A38093? 



THIS BOOK I DEDICATE TO 
MY WIFE 
WHOSE BEAUTIFUL LIFE HAS BEEN AN 
INSPIRATION THROUGH HER DEMONSTRA- 
TION OF THE CHRISTIANITY OF THE CHRIST 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introduction . vii 

Must Protestantism Adopt Christian Science? ... 1 
Must the Church Adopt Christian Science Healing? 31 



INTRODUCTION 

THE purpose of this book is to incite 
churches to revive the faith and practice 
of primitive Christianity. Christian Science is 
showing that such a program can be success- 
fully carried out. 

When the author began to study this move- 
ment as a social phenomenon he was repelled 
by the mess of apparent contradictions, seem- 
ingly incorrect interpretations of the Bible, and 
assumptions which were repugnant to his ec- 
clesiastical egotism. 

As persistent investigation elevated his 
thought to higher planes of spiritual under- 
standing and intuition, he began to realize that 
Christian Science is reviving the teachings 
and practice of Jesus the Christ, who as the 
type of the new manhood must be wrought 
into the new humanity. 



INTRODUCTION 

In this religion, proven to be a high expres- 
sion of the Christianity of the Christ, he found 
that which adopted would enable the Church 
to rise to the primacy of a world-regenerating 
power. If we would honestly read, mark, 
learn, and inwardly digest the science of Chris- 
tianity as spiritually explained in the litera- 
ture of Christian Science and weigh the mean- 
ing of the fruitage of its faith, we would find 
already here what multitudes long for but do 
not look for in this life, — the rebirth of the 
Christianity of Jesus. 

Notwithstanding all that the Church is doing 
so splendidly through federated and individual 
activities, social-service commissions, mission- 
ary enterprises and its numerous specialized 
organizations, it does not seem to have effected 
much, if any, change in the fundamental beliefs 
of the world or to have caused such reduction 
of sin, sickness, poverty, and other abnormal 
conditions as to give much promise of their 
extermination through its agency. 

Civilizations nominally Christian are at war, 
as if their churches did not acknowledge alle- 

viii 



INTRODUCTION 

giance to the Prince of Peace, while socialists, 
in a brotherhood of man, actively oppose war 
the world over. 

Christian Science differs from other churches 
in its attitude to such evils. 

One of its most helpful writers says: 

Mankind has no choice but to take up this problem 
of evil, either on the basis that evil is true or that it is 
false; and this decision will be the keystone to the 
whole situation and to one's success or failure in 
grappling with it. 

The popular systems of religion and medicine and 
the religious and reform movements growing out of 
them have elected to meet evil on the basis that it is 
true and real. 

Christian Science proposes to combat evil on the 
basis that it is neither true nor real. 

As a boy the author found his ideals of a real 
Christian broken by the wrong-doing of some 
church-members. What he then believed im- 
possible of realization he has found in process 
of becoming realized in Christian Science. 

When the entire nation was praying God to 
save the life of President Lincoln, and later of 
Garfield and McKinley, he wondered what was 



INTRODUCTION 

wrong with either God or the prayer, that they 
were not healed. 

Even now, when humanity is on its knees by 
order of the Church authorities and of many 
religious organizations, praying God to avert 
war, the prayer seems about as efficacious as 
a petition to the principles of mathematics 
would be in solving a problem. 

Christian Science shows that the trouble lies 
in a false sense of prayer and of God, and that 
it also comes from the wrong spirit we have 
inherited from historic Christianity. 

An illustration of how erroneous conclusions 
result from investigations which are not based 
on data from the consciousness of patients, and 
do not proceed from the standpoints of spiritual 
healing, is seen in the recent report of the ten 
clergymen of the Church of England and ten 
English physicians of repute. 

They have spent three years in the study of 
prayer and suggestion in therapy, and find that 
all forms of healing by faith, prayer, and what 
not, are instances of suggestion and that equally 
good results are obtained by suggestion with- 



INTRODUCTION 

out spiritual means such as prayer. They con- 
clude that benefit has been found only in 
functional disorders, but not in a single instance 
has there been a bit of proof that an organic 
lesion has been cured by such means. 

This book shows how unscientific and how 
unchristian to a degree are all such investiga- 
tions. 

They are unscientific because among other 
reasons they do not accept as true the diag- 
noses of many thousands of reputable physi- 
cians who have found organic lesions, and have 
treated them in vain; and they reject the testi- 
mony of those so diseased that whatever doc- 
tors called their disease they were healed by 
what is called spiritual healing. 

They are unchristian because they disregard 
the teaching of the Bible respecting the value 
of prayer in healing the sick and do not honor 
the example of Jesus and the apostles and the 
disciples, and the custom of the early Church 
in destroying by Theotheraphy the sicknesses 
which were unlike God. 



INTRODUCTION 

The author has come 1 up against the evils 
of individualism in organizing churches in the 
West, in founding the Church Federation move- 
ment and the guild for serving the interests 
of the thousands of crippled children in the 
tenements of New York City, and in the pro- 
motion of various other societies, as well as in 
some parishes he has served. 

When he was living in the homes of two of 
our worst slums his study of conditions dis- 
closed how indifferent the churches were to 
these evils, even ignorant of their existence, 
and also what they could do if they would, but 
would not. 

His resulting conviction of the necessity of 
the adaptation of the Church to changed con- 
ditions and of throwing on the junk-heap all 
impedimenta is shared by thousands of ear- 
nest Christians who do not wish to leave the 
Church, but who find satisfaction in the study 
and practice of Christian Science. 

The remarkable circulation of over half a 
million copies of the author's first article within 
three months in every part of the world is 

xii 



INTRODUCTION 

evidence of the craving for truth not satisfac- 
torily provided by the Church. 

The numerous letters of appreciation written 
him show the same longing for God. The fol- 
lowing just received are samples. 

We are daughters, granddaughters, great-grand- 
daughters, and great-great-granddaughters of English 
and Episcopal clergymen. ... In the past few years 
we have come to feel that the Church does not 
satisfy our deepest longings, and in taking up the 
study of Christian Science we found that it offered 
something which absolutely satisfies physically, men- 
tally, and spiritually. We have not yet left the 
Church, perhaps because of old associations more 
than anything else, but we have seen the futility of 
the Church to meet our many and great needs. 

Another writes: 

The response to your timely and very helpful 
papers that appeared in The North American Review 
must have shown very clearly the needs of those 
who have failed to find truth or comfort in orthodoxy 
and at the same time cannot consistently unite with 
the Christian Science Church, whose practice and 
theology have been wonderfully helpful to me and 
my family. There must be thousands like us. 

The adoption of Christian Science by the 
Church would mean glad tidings of great joy 



INTRODUCTION 

to millions who long to be one with God and 
do not know how, and to multitudes of hopeless 
invalids who feel that there is no help for them 
in God. 

What are the churches going to do 

ABOUT IT? 

J. WlNTHROP HEGEMAN. 

Baliston Spa, N. Y., July, 191&. 



MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 



MUST PROTESTANTISM 
ADOPT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 



IF correctly reported, the Church Commis- 
sion on healing the sick says, "Any attempt 
on the part of the clergy to enter into competi- 
tion with the medical practitioner by any sepa- 
rate and independent treatment of the sick is to 
be strongly deprecated, not merely on practical 
but also on religious grounds/' 

This statement disregards the commands of 
the Christ. It reveals ignorance of the prac- 
tical and religious grounds on which the re- 
markable success of Christian healing is based. 
It rejects the central fact of the Kingdom of 
God, which is the superiority of spiritual power 
over every form of physical phenomena. 



MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 

The writer would submit the proposition that 
Protestantism must substantially adopt the 
faith and practice of Christian Science if its 
churches are to fulfil their mission to the world. 
This conviction is the result of several years' 
critical and philosophical investigation of the 
doctrines and practice of Christian Science com- 
pared with the experiences and observation of 
many years as a priest of the Church. 

The fact that such a proposition shocks the 
Church sense and meets with contempt is pre- 
sumptive evidence of its truth. Men do not con- 
demn such movements unless they feel the in- 
fluence of them penetrating their prejudices and 
false positions and awakening them to unwel- 
come truth. The Church always has denounced 
and persecuted whatever has not accorded with 
its inherited traditions and formulated beliefs. 

This new-old faith is to be regarded not so 
much a denomination as a fellowship aiming to 
realize in daily life the art of being a Christian, 
the science of which art involves spiritual laws 
which are as capable of demonstration now as 
during the life of the Master. 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 

Its scientific value is found in the personal 
experiences of about a million of its students in 
every part of the world who work out in their 
consciousness and acts the same kind of life 
which was in Christ Jesus. Such testimony 
cannot be affected by the witness of those who 
have not had similar experiences. It is unfair 
to judge them from any other point of view 
than their own, which is the absolute and the 
spiritual. 

All agree in the fact that as church-members 
they could not find the spiritual help they 
craved and were not aided by the ministers to 
find God or to understand Jesus Christ. In 
Christian Science they claim to have found 
satisfaction in these particulars. It is fair to 
suppose that their statements are true, inasmuch 
as their word was never questioned when they 
were active members of these churches, and 
their leaving the churches can hardly be a proof 
of deterioration, especially in the face of their 
consciousness of having become better Chris- 
tians than ever. If they changed their church in 
spite of the love of the associations they had 
formed in childhood and of many sacred ties, 

3 



MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 

through the push of dissatisfaction because 
their souls were starving and the pull into a 
communion where at once they were fed with 
available and living truth, and realized in mem- 
bership a happiness upon a higher plane than 
ever before, it is evident that so far as they are 
concerned the Church lacked an essential which 
Christian Science possesses and which the 
Church must adopt to retain such members. 
If a majority of these people tried every re- 
source of medical science and received no bene- 
fit, and lost all hope when told that nothing 
more could be done for them, and reluctantly 
and with no faith in Christian Science tried it 
and found healing through the apprehension 
of Truth, then for them this religion is identical 
with primitive Christianity. Their testimony 
shows that they would not have gone into 
Christian Science had the Church been as 
Christian and as scientific. 

In our churches to-day multitudes feel the 
same dissatisfaction at the materialism, the sel- 
fishness, and the absence of a sense of God. 
The most conservative apologists of our Church 
admit that somehow, somewhere, something is 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 

wrong, but find in the fact of such admission 
an evidence of spiritual life which they hope 
will become supreme after the forms, forces, 
and truths in this transitional age shall have 
been precipitated as the base of a new order. 
The Church querulously wonders why so many 
thousands are leaving it for agnosticism, so- 
cialism, and material pleasure when it only has 
the words of life. To save itself it frantically 
resorts to various kinds of attraction to interest 
people. It shifts its activities into social, civic, 
economic, and political reforms, institutes so- 
cial commissions, urges the federation of na- 
tional denominations, and proposes very pretty 
schemes for church unity, and some absurd 
plans for evangelizing the whole world. The 
Church seems afraid to venture on the purely 
spiritual life which all people crave. It is as 
true of a church as of a man, "If one have not 
the spirit of Christ, he is none of His." Chris- 
tian Scientists the world over testify that 
having the mind of Christ is the goal toward 
which they are daily striving and which they 
did not find as the aim of the churches they left. 
It seems clear that Protestantism must adopt 



MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 

this purpose as its reason of being if it would 
hold and attract individuals of the same dis- 
position as those who have left its communions. 
It may be many years before our Church will 
grow into the spiritual conditions which make 
possible an adoption of the essential contents 
of Christianity which distinguish Christian 
Science. Thirty national denominations allied 
in federation, with twenty million communi- 
cants, refuse to recognize it, although it is 
working for the same end and in a better spirit. 
The denunciations by many ministers reveal a 
lack of thought and of kindness which raises 
a suspicion that the fear of losing members 
rather than love of truth may account for their 
hostility. Perhaps, because they resent the 
impertinence of mere laymen teaching us ac- 
credited and infallible guides how to find God ! 

If we study the relation of the Church to its 
work of salvation, the need of the adoption of 
Christian Science becomes imperative. Our fail- 
ure to successfully apply Christianity to exist- 
ing conditions is preventing its function of 
regenerating the world. 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 

The Church must serve the people with 
religious truth. We have an army of over 
thirteen million children of school age march- 
ing into citizenship and control of our govern- 
ment without any Sunday-school instruction, 
and many millions more growing away from 
the Church. About fifty million persons are 
outside of any direct influence from our churches. 

The publicity revealing so many shocking 
evils in our civic and social life and economic 
relations makes clear the fact that the Church 
so liberally distributed in all parts of our cities 
and country has failed to prevent their exist- 
ence. 

The Church stands for the deliverance of 
the country from everything false, unlovely, 
and debasing, yet many church-members are 
creators of these evils. The head of the clear- 
ing-house for defectives says: "In New York 
we have twenty thousand defective children, 
largely the direct result of the overwork and 
overstrain to which their mothers are subjected 
in factories. Conditions are worse here than 
in any other country of the world." In order 
that a few thousand may have large wealth, 

7 



MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 

millions suffer. Two million children who 
should be at school and at play are compelled 
to work in canneries, mines, and factories, and 
on farms. Two hundred and fifty thousand 
are being starved or their vitality is lowered 
by adulteration of foods. 

There are more inmates of our insane asylums 
than of all our colleges and universities, — that 
is, we are destroying minds faster than we are 
giving higher education. 

The Church stands for everything normal, 
yet does not prevent conditions largely social 
which wreck health. 

Every year millions die of preventable dis- 
eases notwithstanding the efforts of the best 
medical skill, and about all the Church does is 
to advise the bereaved to be resigned to the 
will of God, "who knows best, and does not 
willingly afflict or grieve the children of men." 
Multitudes live below the living wage, unable 
to lay up for old age or the rainy day, but it 
does not interest the Church, which seems to 
be satisfied with theoretical teaching of the 
law of Love. What an invective against our 

8 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 

Church as a regenerating power are the child- 
labor scandals and white-slave traffic; arson 
trusts, vice trusts, and thief trusts; gambling, 
alcoholism, and drug habits; sickness, slums, 
poverty, insanity, sexual diseases, and crimes 
of all sorts; and the cursing, the moaning, and 
the sobs of industrial baby slaves! 

We of the Church know that every one who 
puts things of material life above the values 
of human well-being is indirectly a party to 
the system of oppression of divine manhood. 
Yet we retain these bad members because they 
are sound in doctrine and help support the 
Church. We point with pride to its gift of 
the hundred million dollars annually to chari- 
ties and its larger amounts for education, 
church support, and missions. As four per cent, 
of our population at the most productive age 
is not only incompetent, but a burden on liberal 
givers, such a sane management is demanded 
of Christendom that this proportion should 
be gradually reduced and incompetency be for 
ever prevented by destroying its causes. The 
"labor question" is played with by those who, 

professionally constituting the Body of Christ, 

9 



MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 

lack His earnestness when He said to the 
eminently respectable church - members who 
economically enslaved the people, "Woe unto 
you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites !" 

The trouble with the Church is that it is too 
materialized to effect spiritual results. Even 
many of its good works are of the carnal-mind 
life. No change of name can cause a change of 
character. No federation or union of materially 
minded denominations can ever produce or- 
ganized world power to bring in God's Kingdom. 
Churches living for themselves do not even see 
the real Christ because the spiritual kingdom 
can be discerned only spiritually. 

The practical effects of the adoption of 
Christian Science would be that not one member 
of the Church would be found in any way con- 
nected with business which puts human well- 
being below material interests. The evils of 
diseases in wrecking homes and bringing into 
being children cursed with sterility, blindness, 
deformity, paralysis, and insanity would be 
banished. Three million people in this country 

who are abnormal and who cost us annually two 

10 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 

hundred millions would ultimately be saved. 
Illness and poverty and sin would be pre- 
vented and the spiritual kingdom would be 
realized. 

Such a statement would be chimerical were 
it not demonstrable. Hundreds of thousands 
bear witness to having risen through Christian 
Science into a spiritual consciousness in which 
sin, poverty, and sickness cannot exist. Here 
is the dynamic of Love, which can regenerate 
the world and elevate the underworld of crime 
and misery to heavenly places of holiness and 

joy. 

The writer by personal investigation and 
critical observation has found desiderata in 
Christian Science which do not obtain in our 
average churches. How desirable it would be 
if our churches, like theirs, could have ninety 
per cent, of their members regularly attend a 
midweek meeting, irrespective of unfavorable 
conditions ! 

No topic of conversation is of such interest to 

Christian Scientists as their faith and practice. 

They talk of it with joy and practise it with 
2 11 



MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 

enthusiasm. With us it is taboo, or spoken of 
with apology and usually voted stupid. 

They never resort to the methods of raising 
money so common in the average church. 
There is no discrimination between rich and 
poor made invidious by pew rentals. They are 
daily striving to have the mind of Christ Jesus 
and are slowly becoming Godlike. 

Their text-book says that no one can become 
a true Scientist until he leaves all to follow 
Christ, and their persistent endeavor is to leave 
every carnal attraction to gain the life hidden 
with Christ in God. Their courtesy and their 
patience under exasperating treatment are un- 
usual. It does seem as if they come nearer 
to loving their enemies than any other class 
of Christians. They so respect individuality 
that they will not serve or treat for healing 
even those who need their help unless asked 
to do so. 

Healing sickness is with them as much a 
religious duty as destroying sin. Both are 
simply a manifestation of the inner spiritual 
life which they are constantly striving to have 
more abundantly. This practice of primitive 

12 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 

Christianity by the disciples for nearly three 
hundred years, which was lost to the Church 
when the Holy Spirit was driven out, is now 
undoubtedly restored in Christian Science. If 
the Church should adopt it there would be mani- 
fest the strongest evidence of the renaissance of 
Christianity. 

The glory of our Church is its missionary 
work, but there is a deplorable lack of knowl- 
edge, interest, and appreciation concerning its 
extension, activity, and support. The Christian 
Scientist is an enthusiastic propagandist, a ra- 
diating center of his belief, not forcing his faith 
upon any one, but letting his good works reveal 
his Father. In a few decades these people have 
extended the knowledge of their faith to every 
part of the world. Every day in every land 
they are systematically studying the same 
selections from the Bible and from their com- 
mentary on it. Lecturers make trips around 
the world, teaching clearly just what Chris- 
tian Science means. A monthly magazine, two 
weekly papers, and a daily newspaper, which 
is a model of Christian journalism, are sowing 
the seeds of Truth everywhere. 

13 



MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 

The fine type of Christian character, the striv- 
ing to have the mind of Christ Jesus, the art 
of healing as an expression of its practical 
theology, the business prosperity, pure living 
following clean thinking, the spirituality, the 
loyal citizenship to the Kingdom of God with 
its ardent missionary spirit, these are the 
undoubted fruits of the Spirit. Such fruitage 
is not common in the average church. 

Besides this superior product, the theology 
of Christian Scientists is more scientific than 
that which is popularly accepted by the 
churches. To them the primary quest is the 
Kingdom of God, and they realize in their in- 
creasing material prosperity that things are in- 
deed thrown in as the promised by-product. 

Both they and the Church agree that the 
God, whose is the Kingdom, is the one and only 
God. He is Spirit, Love, Life, and Truth. 
He is infinite Personality, Omnipresent, Omni- 
scient, and Omnipotent. We believe this as a 
reasonable proposition. They believe it as a 
working Principle. 

Our God is an enlarged likeness of sinless 

14 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 

man. He comes down to us by incarnation in 
Jesus and is diffused through humanity by the 
Holy Spirit. We call Him by prayer and meet 
Him in hallowed localities and in sacraments. 
Often instead of worshiping God we find we are 
worshiping only an idea of Him, and a dead 
idea at that. 

The Christian Science concept of God is free 
from the material limitations of anthropo- 
morphism. It makes God, infinite Principle, 
Love, everywhere present in all the fullness of 
His infinite Personality. On this concept it 
bases its beautiful theistic idealism. God is 
what He is wherever He is. In such a pres- 
ence completely filling the universe with His 
Being and its manifold expression, other gods 
are unthinkable; so are sin and things false 
and selfish. The average churchman con- 
structs his own Pantheon. Because his God 
sits aloof from human interests he gives his 
little divinities God's place in his life and con- 
duct. The Scientist, knowing only one God, 
is a zealous destroyer of false gods in his own 
life and everywhere. 

Wherever God is, He is omniscient, and 

15 



MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 

therefore needs not to be told what we want 
as if He had not thought of our needs when He 
created the world. Everywhere He is omnip- 
otent, hence any power contrary to Him and 
His purposes and laws is inconceivable. He is 
everywhere operative and operating all the 
while, and is always available for every one's 
needs. 

From these facts of absolute and infinite 
Being the Christian Scientist draws practical 
conclusions and applies them to his daily needs. 

The Church makes the creation of man 
chiefly material. Christian Science makes it 
wholly spiritual. 

Both teach that man was made in the image 
and likeness of God. 

The Church holds that sin destroyed this 
image and that God sent misery, disease, and 
death as a curse. Total depravity and original 
sin became racial and universal facts. Chris- 
tian Science believes that because man was 
made like God he is thereby perfect. The 
real, spiritual man could not fall. The ma- 
terial man cannot be real, nor can the real man 

16 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 

be both material and spiritual. If man, sepa- 
rated from God, could so overcome evil that 
he could ultimately become like God and reach 
a stage where he would be unable to fall, then 
God would have given to fallen man the power 
to create, with the help of sin, a superior man 
to the one He Himself made without the aid 
of sin. 

As to how there could be sin in a perfect 
creation, no explanation is found which can 
harmonize conflicting difficulties. The Church 
says God gave man free-will and foresaw that 
by its exercise he would disobey. By this 
decree He was either not able or not willing 
to prevent the fall, and by it the entrance of sin 
and death into the world. He used the situa- 
tion, however, as a background to display His 
mercy and love to man. By blood atonement 
He would become reconciled to man, and so 
man would be saved. Again, making a better 
man by the aid of sin than the one created in 
His image. 

The problem of how the illusions of false 
sense came into seeming existence is not as 
interesting or important to Christian Scientists 

17 



MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 

as the problem of how to escape from discord 
in order to enter harmony. It is their business, 
as it was the Master's, to uncover the nature of 
error vitiating the human consciousness and to 
show men the principle which, applied, will 
effect its elimination. 

The Church and Christian Science agree that 
only through the atonement of Jesus Christ 
can man be saved. Against the numerous 
theories of the atonement we state the Chris- 
tian Science interpretation as follows: God 
never needed to be reconciled to man, but the 
natural man must be reconciled to God. Jesus 
the Christ came to reveal our essential oneness 
with God and the consequent perfection of our 
spiritual selfhood. This realized would cause 
us to crucify whatever tended to separate us 
from Him. God is regarded as just as much 
interested in our individually doing our part 
in the atonement as He was in Christ Jesus 
doing His part as the type or pattern for hu- 
manity. The life of Jesus was a manifestation 
of His oneness with God, the source of all power, 
and of the sovereignty of spiritual understand- 

18 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 

ing over all the beliefs of material sense. By 
His realization of this atonement He healed 
the sick, cast out devils, walked on the water, 
hushed the storm, raised the dead, laid down 
His life to take it again and to rise out of the 
material bodily sense of being into the spiritual 
realities of God's Kingdom. This revelation 
of man's oneness with the Father makes one 
conscious of his perfection as the reflection of 
the perfect God. Being at one with God, our 
individuality is no more an independent entity 
than an idea coming into our consciousness can 
be an exclusive possession. Our life is simply 
an expression of the infinite Life as an idea is 
the expression of universal Truth. 

The explanation of Christian Science healing 
is found in the fact that all evil is the phenom- 
enon of false sense, which is dispelled by the 
dawning of Truth in human consciousness. 
The lie of evil being cast out, its phenomena of 
sin and sickness must disappear. If we explain 
the presence of sickness as sent by God, we have 
Perfection sending imperfection, Harmony ex- 
pressing discord, and Truth originating falsity. 

19 



MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 

A good God then must think evil. If indeed 
God could send it only goodness should be seen 
in it, and man should regard it as normal and 
something to thank Him for, and might be 
pardoned for holding that Jesus and phy- 
sicians and health engineers in trying to pre- 
vent it and heal it are opposing the Divine 
Will, and that the Church is right in not try- 
ing to remove physical evils. The healing of 
Christian Scientists is an expression of working 
out their redemption by atonement, not as a 
theory, but as a divine organic oneness which 
must be personally demonstrated to reveal its 
reality. Gaining the consciousness of divine 
indwelling and of God's Kingdom within them, 
they by faith and spiritual understanding know 
that sickness cannot be in the same presence, 
and that these ills are unreal, though to false 
sense intensely and painfully real. They reason 
that if God be everywhere present, anything 
unlike Him can be nowhere present. If He be 
omniscient, error and its inharmony can never 
be in such a presence. If omnipotence be every- 
where no power can be anywhere against it. If 

illness be real, it must be outside of God or 

20 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 

within Him. Omnipresence makes it physi- 
cally impossible for it to be outside of Him. 
If within Him, then there would be evil in the 
Divine Mind — also impossible, psychologically. 
If this idealism which is so real produces 
better lives, healthier and purer living than 
Protestantism is producing, and its fruitage 
proves to be identical with that of primitive 
Christianity, the Church must adopt it as the 
true science of the Christian life. It has the 
dynamic of a faith which works by Love, 
opens spiritual understanding, makes God a real 
presence, and by thus transforming the life be- 
comes a world power. 

To realize its mission as a world-regenerating 
life it must appeal to that which is fundamental 
in every religion, race, and civilization. It must 
demonstrate its efficiency to improve upon the 
inherited beliefs from which they get their in- 
spiration. The Protestant missions in their ag- 
gressive, heroic, and co-operative ministry are 
heavily handicapped by the failure of the 
Church to regenerate its own life and make its 

own country come up to the standard which it 

21 



MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 

earnestly holds up to the so-called heathen. 
The Kingdom of God removes sin, sickness, 
poverty, fear, worry, and their results. The 
regenerating Church as part of the expression of 
that kingdom must show all nations how in its 
own country it has been able to effect this. 
Until this has been done among its own mem- 
bers at least it cannot expect to demonstrate 
its practicality. It fails to do this. 

Christian Science organizes no civic, social, 
or political movement to destroy evil, but dis- 
closes evils in the individual and applies divine 
Truth, Life, and Love to eradicate them. It 
removes economic distress and slavery by the 
love coming from the atonement of Jesus 
Christ. Its teaching states the ground of eco- 
nomic freedom and shows the law by which 
poverty may be abolished anywhere in the 
world. To effect this one has only to follow 
Jesus in praying to God as the spiritual source 
of all supply. Thousands have become mis- 
sionaries bearing witness to its efficiency in 
relieving them from penury and business 
distress. 

To remove illness as a cause of many resulting 

22 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 

evils one must do as Jesus did, who opened His 
life to let God through upon those who by faith 
opened their lives to receive Him. Our Church 
is recognizing this duty as its function, as seen 
in its Emmanuel Movement and its Commission 
for instituting an office of healing by anointing 
and prayer. Protestantism is not competent 
to teach the full Gospel unless it includes healing 
the sick as an evidence of God's presence in the 
lives of its members and adopts the Christian 
Science method as practically identical with the 
way of Jesus Christ. To destroy sin is, among 
our churches, largely a matter of egoistic will- 
power. The way of Christian Science is to 
see the sin disclosed by some temptation and 
to bring into the consciousness the sense of 
Christ's Truth which expels the sin. This is 
based on the way Jesus resisted temptations. 
He kept sin out by always keeping God within. 
God as the only Cause can effect only positive 
holiness, and therefore utterly abolishes its 
negations. 

The Christian Science interpretation of the 
Bible gives catholicity for a world-transforming 

23 



MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 

religion identical with the primary and ultimate 
purpose of Christ's Christianity respecting sin. 
It is one with the Old Testament tracing of evil 
to a perverse will. It also is one with the 
Aryan philosophy, which finds that error, or a 
disturbance of the harmony of Truth, is the 
cause of sickness and sin. The expulsion of 
negation by its positive is the most effective 
way of driving out sin and sickness and their 
resultant evils. It destroys false beliefs because 
when Truth comes in, error, the unreal, goes 
out. When Life enters, discords, sickness, limi- 
tations, and want leave. When Love is ad- 
mitted, fear, worry, and all forms of selfishness 
are cast out. Everything unlike God, who is so 
real to them, becomes nothing in their conscious- 
ness. As their text-book says, "One infinite 
God (good) unifies men and nations; constitutes 
the brotherhood of man; fulfils the scripture, 
'Love thy neighbor as thyself; annihilates 
pagan and Christian idolatry, whatever is 
wrong in social, civil, criminal, political, and 
religious codes; equalizes the sexes, annuls the 
curse on man, and leaves nothing that can sin, 
suffer, be punished or destroyed." 

24 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 

These points are enough to show the superior- 
ity of Christian Science as a spiritual commen- 
tary on the Bible and as a guide into the 
Truth as it is in Christ Jesus. Yet it is 
simply what the Church holds theoretically 
without, however, applying to conduct the 
logical conclusions drawn from its theol- 
ogy. 

The Church has failed to appreciate it be- 
cause it does not care to find out if these things 
be true, and catches up incorrect and partial 
expositions of it and accepts as true the claims 
of callow enthusiasts whose healing too often is 
rather a mental massage and thought manipula- 
tion than the working of God as Truth. Even 
when carefully studied there are often confusion 
and repulsion because words which are symbols 
of material objects must be used to convey 
spiritual reality, and also because to see spiritual 
concepts requires spiritual perception. Back of 
all misunderstanding, however, is unmistakable 
evidence of what it is worth by what it has 
done for many hundreds of thousands in saving 
them from sin, shame, poverty, sickness, and 
despair, which the churches of which they were 

25 



MUST PROTESTANTISM ADOPT 

members could neither do nor show them how to 
have done. 

It stands related to Protestantism somewhat 
as the primitive Church to the Jewish religion. 

Against materialism it is the most powerful 
protest ever known, destructive of it by its 
constructive life as spiritual only and expressive 
of absolute being. Against caste and exclusive 
selfishness it is building up a democracy of those 
who are members one of another and all equal 
as children of God. A million and more, all 
laymen, who have come out of slavery to the 
false are fighting an inspiring campaign to 
abolish the whole body of sin, poverty, disease, 
and death. 

In its results it is proportionally more success- 
ful in healing than medical science, and in 
spiritual salvation than the Church. 

Against that type of socialism whose slogan 
is "No God, No Master," it presents the true 
conception of God unlike the one so long taught 
us, a Being so real and attractive as to compel 
adoration. Against "No Master" it so pre- 
sents Christ Jesus as the One Master that 
when these wild protestants against the social 

26 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE? 

order curse the Church they hurrah for Jesus 
and call Him Master. 

Christian Science seems to be the only 
power in religion to retard and return the 
tide that is setting away from God and the 
Church, by revealing the God whom they in 
heart ignorantly worship and whom on their 
lower plane they desire but see not. 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT CHRIS- 
TIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

AN adequate remedy has been found for 
jlJl every disease. This cure - all inheres in 
the essence of Christianity. The Church as 
the organ of Christianity ought to use it to do 
away with the causes of disease. 

By its very nature this panacea ought to be 
able to heal all sickness. It does. Through- 
out the world to-day hundreds of thousands 
who have been healed by it are using it to 
ultimately secure a sickless humanity, It is 
much farther reaching than the wonders of 
surgery, laboratory research, preventive medi- 
cine, and sanitary engineering in their cam- 
paign against disease. Its possibilities of trans- 
formation stagger even the credulous, and for 
the very joys involved people fear to believe 

it, saying, "It is too good to be true!" Chris- 

31 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

tian Science has reasserted that it is an essential 
part of the Christian life, practised by Jesus 
Christ, obligatory upon His followers, and used 
by them as correlated with preaching the word, 
having been a part of the program of the 
Church for several centuries. It claims that by 
the use of this panacea it has already healed 
every known type of disease, and also that the 
method of its application is an approximation 
to that of Jesus the Christ, if not identical 
with it. 

When it is suggested that the Church adopt 
it many think that the limit of superstition 
and presumption has been reached. The Church 
itself rejects it and often denounces those who 
believe in it. Yet the Church has always be- 
lieved in a sickless humanity — a happy land, 
but far, far away beyond this life in the King- 
dom of Heaven. Christian Science, accepting 
the words of Jesus, affirms that the Kingdom 
is here now among men and within them in 
process of being revealed and that really none 
of its citizens can be sick. The consummation 
of this Kingdom of God on earth is not gained 

32 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

by the fiat of the Almighty, but by the process, 
necessarily gradual and therefore long, in which 
those entering it make its contents realities to 
be lived. The point for the Church to consider 
is not whether it is politic or desirable to adopt 
this healing, but whether, if the contention of 
Christian Science be made good, it will exer- 
cise its function, so nearly atrophied, in obey- 
ing the command of its Head to heal the sick. 
This would not be taking up work that is out- 
side its province, because healing was one of its 
recognized functions for centuries. Nor would 
it be an address to problems which others are 
better able to solve, or interfering with the 
profession of materia medica in its various ac- 
tivities. It would not ignore the evolution of 
society wherein specialization of functions has 
assigned to doctors the care of the body and 
to the Church the care of the soul. However, 
while gravestones are monuments to the fail- 
ure of physicians to heal every disease to which 
their science and art are applied, it is true that 
ultimately the doctors will either adopt the 
methods of Christian Science, as some of them 
now do, or a new body of practitioners will arise 

33 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

to heal by metaphysical means, as many are 
now doing. 

Of course, if the Church should take up heal- 
ing as one of its duties it could not to-day 
use its former methods which were on the level 
of superstitions, fetishes, yogi, fakirs, and 
quacks. These were the best it then knew, 
although it should have known better, and have 
entirely fallen out of modern consciousness. It 
could not cure insanity by torturing and 
scourging the body as the means of exorcising 
an obsessing demon, nor confine the victims 
in the horrors and filth of Bethlehem Hospital, 
contracted into the word bedlam as an expres- 
sion of disgust and reproach. By a changed 
theory Pinel in a few months put an end to 
such treatment and healed the insane. 

Nor could the Church use any of its tradi- 
tional prescriptions. It should be understood 
that the adoption of Christian Science heal- 
ing does not mean the practice of medicine. 
This error is the basis of attempted legisla- 
tion to forbid this healing which uses noth- 
ing but spiritual means. The authorities 

34 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

did not accuse Jesus of anything worthy of 
death because He healed the multitudes. It 
is an act of religion by which Christians obey 
their Master, following His example and prov- 
ing the truth by signs following. It rejects 
human mind-healing, the exercise of will-power 
to eliminate disease, vibrations, mental coer- 
cion, telepathy, suggestion, hypnotism in any 
form, relics or fetishes. It is beyond Emmanuel- 
ism because it makes no use of hypnotic sug- 
gestion and does not lean on the arm of materia 
medica. Because it opposes hypnotic sugges- 
tion, which is useless for healing organic dis- 
eases, it does not restrict its healing to func- 
tional diseases, thus limiting God's ability. 

The fundamental fact upon which Christian 
Science healing stands is the assurance that 
there is a region filled with divine consciousness. 

In it there can be no limitations of time or 
space, because God is absolute, and must there- 
fore be eternal and omnipresent. Nothing in 
it can be perceived by physical sense, because 
God is Spirit, and all the contents of this realm 
must be spiritual. In this consciousness of 

35 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

Good, no thought of evil can anywhere exist; 
hence, unless sickness be of God and there- 
fore good, it has no existence in Him. Where 
perfect Life is there can be no inharmony what- 
soever; and, as sickness is disturbed harmony, 
it must be excluded. It is clear, then, that 
sickness cannot possibly exist in this region 
of God. 

The question arises, however, Can it enter 
somewhere in the unfolding of His life and plans? 
and we answer, Can the effects contain any 
thing or quality that is not in the cause? Can 
the stream of Truth and Love and Beauty, 
outflowing from the only Source, receive any 
tributary flowing in from any possible other 
source? If sickness entered any part of God's 
creation He must have changed from the charac- 
ter He had before He began to create. Equally 
unthinkable would be the existence of another 
power which could change the quality of any- 
thing that He had made and introduce discord 
into the infinite harmony of His creations. If 
God be omnipotent, the existence of a power 
hostile to Him must have been created by Him 
and endowed with the ability to oppose Him 

36 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

and mar the harmony of the universe. That 
would mean that His creations were not perfect. 
Since only perfection can be expressed by a 
perfect God, if His works be imperfect there 
must have been imperfection in the Mind who 
thought the universe into being. He could not 
originate sickness without having first thought 
sickness as a condition of man, whom He 
created in His likeness. Sickness has no like- 
ness to holiness, wholeness, health. 

It is clear, therefore, that there can be no 
sickness in this region of God-consciousness. 
Neither can it exist as reality in any of His 
creations, which are never outside, so to speak, 
of His consciousness. 

Although sickness and its causes and resulting 
miseries seem such inherent parts of our lives 
here, and although to mortal thinking it seems 
impossible to reconcile them to the presence of a 
good and all-powerful God, yet the fact must 
permanently and persistently be held that God 
is not different now from what He was before 
worlds began to become. Also that His crea- 
tion is continuous, since "in Him all things con- 
sist"; and that, as He pronounced everything 

37 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

that He had made as "very good/' it, as a per- 
fect product, cannot be improved by adding 
anything to it or deteriorated by taking any- 
thing from it. All His works are as perfect 
to-day as when He created them, and because 
He is creating them to-day. 

In this region of divine consciousness, where 
Love is ever active as the Principle of Being 
unfolding in unnumbered types with their in- 
finite variations, there must be perfect harmony 
everywhere now as there was before creation. 
As Mind has thought the ideas wrought into 
creation, none can exist which does not express 
Truth and is therefore not free from falsity. 
All the inhabitants of this region where God is 
All-in-all are filled according to their capacity 
with the divine consciousness. God is their 
habitat, and by organic oneness with Him they 
can manifest nothing unlike Him. Yet sick- 
ness actually enters the mortal sense of life be- 
cause we do not realize that our real life is in 
God. As Mrs. Eddy has said, "Sickness is 
neither imaginary nor unreal — that is, to the 
frightened, false sense of the patient. Sickness 
is more than fancy; it is solid conviction." 

38 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

To this false material sense there is another 
region full of seeming realities. It is the realm 
of material sense, called by St. Paul the natural 
man, the old man, and carnal mind, which is at 
enmity against God. Its god is a compound 
concept made of attributes projected from this 
human mind, and has no existence in reality. 
He is cruel, jealous, angry, arbitrary, and 
changeable. Prayers and oblations and vows 
are the means used to induce him to do man's 
will. He sends sickness, and therefore it is use- 
less to ask him to take it away, so man resorts 
to measures with which this god is supposed to 
have nothing directly to do. Such a concept 
has been saddled upon our lives by past teaching, 
and even to-day is riding us into all sorts of 
fears and worries, hypocrisy and material wor- 
ship. Sickness and sin are ultimately to be 
destroyed by catastrophism, and then this god 
shall throw into the rubbish-heap all his mis- 
takes and misfits. 

This region of mortal sense is made up en- 
tirely of the negations of the positive realities 
of the realm of God-consciousness. Its man is 
a counterfeit of the real man, the genuine super- 

39 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

scription of God's image. He is a weaver of his 
own world, thinking and believing and imaging, 
and externalizing these concepts upon the ma- 
terial body. This is how he started, according 
to the second record in Genesis. The supposed 
ruler of this region is a liar and the father of it. 
It is the only source and cause of disease, in- 
harmony, and limitation of every kind. Only 
here can be found the belief in sin, sickness, 
poverty, and death as realities in God's being. 
The real man, seemingly submerged under this 
false sense of life, protests by his very belief in 
death as an enemy that shall be destroyed, and 
this protest witnesses to the fact that God 
could not send anything which could possibly be 
destroyed. Aspiring consciousness looks by 
faith through the accumulated false beliefs up 
toward and a bit into the realities of the King- 
dom of God. 

A second fact entering as a factor into spirit- 
ual healing is this — that man is the perfect idea 
of God. Made in God's likeness and the very 
image of Him, the reflection of perfect Being 
cannot be imperfect. Nor can he manifest any- 

40 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

thing which is not in the Original. This man, 
the reality, is a citizen of the Kingdom of 
Heaven on earth, and not of the supposititious 
lower-world region, flesh and devil. He is not 
only not of the lower, but not a compound of 
both, and he is entirely of the upper, wholly spir- 
itual. The claim of a twofold nature in man is 
based upon the respective contents of these two 
regions, and is like the theory of the ellipse as the 
orbit of the planets. In it are two foci — the 
real center and an imaginary one. Progress in 
human life may be measured by the shortening 
of the distance between them. Perfection can 
be fully realized only when God alone becomes 
the center. In His movements about such a 
real center Jesus knew no imaginary center. 
Although he felt the pull of the world, there was 
never the slightest deviation from the sweep of 
the perfect circle of His life. 

Another element in spiritual healing is that 
it is the demonstration of the presence of the King- 
dom of God here now and the evidence of man as 
the likeness of God here and now. 

This was the mission of Jesus the Christ. 

41 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

He was made "in the likeness of sinful flesh" 
to prove that as "the first born among many 
brethren" He was really the Son of God. Not 
even in Gethsemane or on the cross did He 
lose the consciousness of God, even when the 
task assumed seemed impossible and when it 
seemed that the Father had forsaken Him. 
By His works and words, and by His progress 
out of the claims of the material by the process 
of daily ascension, He showed how all could 
rise into the divine consciousness and there 
be free from every claim of the region of lies 
and sickness which were crushing humanity. 
Sickness, as one of the beliefs of this false region, 
must be overcome in the same way as sin, by 
the faith which would lift man into the region 
where sickness was never known. To the mind 
of Jesus Christ the realization of His oneness 
with God the Father was such a sure conviction 
that He could not think of Himself or others 
as entities external to God, independent of Him 
or separate from Him, and therefore as being 
sick. His healing was simply not seeing the 
existence of disease as being more than seeming, 
and this instantaneously caused its disappear- 

42 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

ance as light at once banishes darkness. He 
showed that Light, Truth, Life, Love, Good- 
ness, and Beauty were never absent, and when 
the beliefs which prevented their perception 
were overcome the patient realized that they 
always had been present. He reflected God 
and protested against being in any sense a per- 
son apart from Him. "The works ye see me 
do, I do not of myself: the Father that dwelleth 
in me, He doeth the works." He used no will- 
power or suggestion from the region of the car- 
nal-mind life. He healed at a distance because 
God, who does the healing, encircles all being, 
and knows no limitations of space. The so- 
called dead were in the same divine Omnipres- 
ence, and in this consciousness Jesus recalled 
them. Even with Lazarus the power of God, 
who, as infinite Life, could have no thought of 
decay, operated immediately. 

To keep in this God-consciousness required 
constant watching and praying. Jesus spent 
whole nights in prayer. Notwithstanding, even 
when in this consciousness, He failed to heal 
once, and perhaps many times, because they 
would not by faith open their lives to receive 

4 43 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

God. In His native village He could do no 
mighty works because of their unbelief. Only 
by rising into this region of the Kingdom of 
God in conscious realization of Truth could 
healing be done. Jesus told the disciples who 
wanted to know why they could not cast out 
the disease from the lad whom He had to heal 
because of their lack of faith, that "this kind 
cometh not forth but by prayer and fasting." 
That is, if they would have the God-conscious- 
ness they must rise into it, negatively by cast- 
ing out the interfering beliefs of the lower region 
of the false so as to be able to reflect health, and 
positively through prayer so to rise into the 
higher realm of Truth that they would be filled 
with God and consciously realize power and 
health and harmony to reflect. 

One may ask how the healing is effected from 
a physiological point of view, and we answer: 
It is done only from the spiritual standpoint. 
How does truth destroy an error, or harmony 
a discord, or beauty ugliness? It is simply a 
normal condition realized which does the work. 
To win the ability demands study, practice, 

44 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

and striving, then awakened right sense be- 
comes master. Because God is Truth, any 
truth is of God; and if it be received, God is 
received in it and with it. A truth acts on an 
error automatically and instantly, and appar- 
ently through the agency of subjective mind, 
removes by molecular action the materialized 
effects of error. The presence of the positive 
dispels its negative. It is plain that only the 
concept of God as Love and Truth and Life, 
Spirit and Principle, can effect this, and not the 
anthropomorphic deity of human belief. It is 
to be noted that not in* a single instance did 
Jesus resort to material remedies. Nor is 
there any evidence that His disciples used any 
power other than that of the Kingdom. The 
twelve were sent to preach and to heal. The 
seventy were commissioned to heal the sick, 
and this service was thus rendered as obligatory 
as preaching the Gospel. When St. Luke, the 
physician, became a follower of Jesus he healed 
only by spiritual power and knew better than 
to use his former remedies. Every case of 
healing was a manifestation of the presence of 
the God who is Love, Life, Spirit, and Truth. 

45 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

This is significant of Christian Science healing. 
Christian Science is primarily the scientific re- 
ligion of the Christ, and the healing of disease 
is simply one of the signs following its exercise. 
Whenever and wherever men rose into the 
realm of God-consciousness and realized His 
presence and power this supremacy of the spir- 
itual mastered the material. It supplied the 
widow's cruse of oil and her barrel of 
flour, and it enabled Jesus to feed the mul- 
titude with seven loaves and two small 
fishes. 

Nearly every case of sickness was healed im- 
mediately. There was no process of recovery, 
no reaching a crisis, no administering of tonics, 
no caution about diet or change of air. The 
sick were well at once, because the God-con- 
sciousness entered, thereby dispelling the error 
of their thought and thus removing its effect 
on the body. The inner man is always healed 
before bodily normality results. Disease van- 
ished into nothingness as soon as the presence 
of health was realized in consciousness, just as 
an error in mathematics disappears as soon as 
the correct factor enters. 

46 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

This spiritual healing continued even to the 
early part of the fifth century in the days of 
St. Augustine, who records the following in- 
stances in his De Civitate Dei, liber 22. A blind 
man was restored to sight. In Carthage a case 
where a number of fistulse were removed by the 
knife, one escaping attention, the doctors tried 
drugs, but in vain, and to the man's anguish, 
another operation was necessary. The day be- 
fore the operation friends prayed so earnestly 
that Augustine said in his heart, "O Lord, what 
prayers of Thy people dost Thou hear if Thou 
hearest not these?" The dreaded morning 
comes, "the surgeon, with knife in hand, eagerly 
looks for the sinus that is to be cut. He searches 
for it, feels for it; he applies every kind of 
scrutiny and finds a perfectly firm cicatrix." 
Innocentia, a very devout woman of the highest 
rank in the State, when told by the physician 
that she had an incurable cancer, betook herself 
to God alone by prayer. When her physician 
found on examination that she was perfectly 
healed he asked her for the remedy, and, when 
told, said in disgust, "I thought you would make 
some great discovery to me." She replied, 

47 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

"What great thing was it for Christ to heal a 
cancer, who raised one who had been four days 
dead?" 

This theory of healing is further proven 
to be Theotherapy by the fact that when the 
Church lost the sense of God's presence it could 
not heal the sick. Whenever men realized the 
God-consciousness by their oneness with Him, 
as in the instances of St. Francis, Luther, Wes- 
ley, Swedenborg, the Waldenses, spiritual heal- 
ing reappeared. 

Keen observers of events assert that the world 
is entering upon a remarkable spiritual era, and 
by many signs that is true. If so, then we 
would once more have the healing of disease by 
the same power which has been manifested in 
the days of spiritual men and movements. This 
has surely come in the remarkable spiritual 
movement called Christian Science, of which the 
healing of the sick is a relatively insignificant 
manifestation in the material kingdom. The 
claim that this movement is bringing the 
divine consciousness into manifestation is 
based upon the same evidence which Jesus 

48 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

used to convince John that He was from 
God. 
Mrs. Eddy writes: 

The marvelous healing power of goodness is the 
outflowing life of Christianity. It was the con- 
summate naturalness of Truth in the mind of Jesus 
that made His healing easy and instantaneous. 
The master metaphysician understood Omnipotence 
to be All-power: because Spirit was to Him All-in- 
all, matter was palpably an error of premise and 
conclusion, while God was the only substance, Life, 
and intelligence of man. — Miscellaneous Writings, 
page 199. 

The following evidence is submitted to prove 
that the healing marvels of Christian Science 
are the phenomena of God's Kingdom. In not 
a single instance were material methods re- 
sorted to. In every case the healing was claimed 
to be the result of the aspiration and achieve- 
ment of the healer to be at one with God. 
Generally the patient felt this spiritual presence 
accompanying the cure and rejoiced in that he 
was made whole. 

The following record in the Broadway Maga- 
zine, made six years ago, with each case veri- 
fied and with no relapse to date, will sustain 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

the practicality of this cure-all which chal- 
lenges the world. Out of fourteen thousand 
patients in New York State who asserted that 
they were either completely cured or perma- 
nently benefited by Christian Science about 
five thousand had been given up by physi- 
cians or had despaired of receiving relief from 
medical treatment. That is, these thousands 
who practically had been handed over to the 
undertakers were alive, well and happy, and 
affirmed that Christian Science did it. The 
numerous diseases cured were not hysteria, 
phantom, or functional troubles merely, but, 
as diagnosed by doctors and specialists, heart 
failure, nervous prostration, tuberculosis, ap- 
pendicitis, peritonitis, fevers, Bright's disease, 
pneumonia, paralysis, paresis, insanity, cancer, 
deafness, blindness, and many other equally 
serious afflictions. The average treatment by 
Christian Science lasted less than one month, 
and often only a day, or even less than an 
hour. 

Of these instances the writer knows nothing 
personally, but from what he has found within 

50 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

his circle of friends he has reason to believe 
that they are true. A friend of the author 
was a physician on the surgical consulting 
staff of Rush College, a member of its fac- 
ulty, and a member of the American Medical 
Association until he became a Christian Scien- 
tist. He had tuberculosis, and the prognosis 
was that he could live only a few months. He 
had depended on alcohol and heroin, and abso- 
lute irresponsibility, insanity, and coming death 
were the result. After treatments by a hyp- 
notist his physical and mental condition grew 
rapidly worse, until within a few weeks his 
reason was gone. After a week of irresponsibil- 
ity, followed by two days of unconsciousness, 
a consultation of physicians pronounced him 
incurable and limited his life to a few days. 
The night before he was to be taken to an in- 
sane asylum a friend suggested Christian 
Science, and his wife consented in the same 
spirit of desperation in which any other useless 
thing would have been allowed. A practitioner 
came and remained three hours. The Doctor 
says: "At the end of the first hour I was quiet- 
ly sleeping, and when I awoke in the morning 

51 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

it was with a clear mind and the absolute con- 
viction, which has not changed since, that I was 
free and well. So far as I know, there is no 
instance in medical literature of the recovery 
of any one taking the amount of these drugs 
which I had been taking. The most remark- 
able feature of the cure was that there was no 
period of convalescence. The same afternoon 
I drove my automobile for two hours without 
weariness or excitement. Within ten days 
from the time I was pronounced incurable I 
crossed the Nevada desert, where unusual en- 
durance and physical strength were necessary. 
I found from that day that my mental equip- 
ment was normal, memory improved and soon 
fully restored, compound astigmatism healed, 
use of tobacco had fallen from me, and grad- 
ually a cavity involving the upper part of the 
left lung became filled with healthy lung tis- 
sue." Believing Christian Science to be a 
variety of suggestion or hypnotism which he 
would incorporate in his medical practice, he 
studied Science and Health, of which he says: 
"Many times I put it away with a feeling of 
impatience that the grain of truth which I felt 

52 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

must be there was buried in what seemed to 
be a mass of nonsense, yet I reflected that 
thousands of intelligent people had come to the 
conclusion that these things which to me were 
absurdities were really profound truths. I have 
not yet been able to disprove the statements, and 
so far it has stood all the tests to which I have 
subjected it. Of the whole list of diseases cov- 
ered by the standard text-books, between thirty 
and forty per cent, are supposed to be in- 
curable by the time that diagnosis is possible. 
According to Christian Science, this whole list 
is wiped out; there is no malady known that 
has not been healed by this treatment." 

This gentleman is of a well-known family of 
professional educators, and his experience is typi- 
cal of thousands of others. One such instance 
ought to satisfy any honest man that Christian 
Science did for this case what materia medica 
had failed to do, though tested by experts of 
the highest standing, who had used all the 
remedies known to the world of science. 

Another case even better known to the 
writer was a school-teacher and preacher who 

53 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

was healed by his own effort. He inherited 
tuberculosis, liver complaint, chronic bronchitis, 
and dyspepsia, and suffered from the secondary 
troubles of kidneys, neuralgia, and rheumatism. 
Physicians and their remedies were useless. 
By the study of the Bible in the light of Science 
and Health he realized the power of Truth over 
the human organism. The first result was a 
consciousness of the reality of the spiritual. 
Some of his troubles vanished almost at once, 
and others went and came back, but gradually 
disappeared, not to return. He was freed from 
every physical trouble and even economic diffi- 
culties. He was led into helping others, and 
most of his numerous patients were healed, and 
all of them were benefited. One case was that 
of a man who in one year had fifteen physicians, 
all of whom diagnosed his case as valvular 
heart disease, for which there was no hope. 
My friend was called in, and the attending 
physician, after waiting two hours for death 
to come, went away saying he couldn't do any- 
thing, as the man couldn't possibly last till 
morning. My friend gave him Christian 
Science treatment, and in a few days the 

54 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

man was about, and in a few weeks was 
normal. 

The personal experience of the writer in 
being healed and in healing proved to his com- 
plete satisfaction the presence of the Principle 
who was available in time of need. An attack 
of acute indigestion was healed by a physician 
in about a week; a more severe attack two 
years later was relieved within half an hour 
by a student of Christian Science. About two 
years afterward the same kind of illness was 
healed instantaneously when he himself applied 
treatment at the moment when life seemed to 
be leaving the body. 

According to the growth in his conscious 
realization of the factors of the Kingdom of 
God he has healed others progressively when 
called in to minister to them. One was a case 
of tuberculosis said by the physician to be 
hopeless. The second, of bladder trouble, ac- 
cording to the attending physician, who said 
the patient had only a couple of hours to live, 
who after treatment was much better and out 
on the street in a few days. The other was a 

55 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

case of valvular heart disease. A specialist and 
two physicians had said the patient was dying. 
The death-dew was on his brow, and he was 
kept alive only by oxygen. Christian Science 
treatment was given, and the sufferer at once 
became decidedly better. 

These are facts which cannot be disproved. 
They are confirmed in the experiences of many 
hundreds of thousands. Why classify them 
with schools which merely heal the body when 
this physical healing by spiritual means is the 
sign of an inner spiritual health? Why speak 
of them as coincidences and happenings when 
the cure has synchronized with or systemati- 
cally followed treatment and had not done so 
with the medical treatment they had received? 
Why do those living in the carnal-mind region 
deny experiences of which they as yet can know 
nothing? The healing of Christian Science 
does not aim simply at curing the disease or 
the patient by addressing treatment to either. 
The practitioner treats himself by striving to 
have the Mind of the Christ, so that, rising 
into God - consciousness, he takes with him 

56 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

those who organically are one with him, mem- 
bers one of another, to receive that which he 
experiences. In thus realizing the realities of 
Being he declares the truth respecting his 
needy brother and helps him into spiritual free- 
dom. He becomes conscious by the witness of 
ihe Spirit in him that he lias drawn power 
from the same region which supplied the Old 
Testament prophets and seers, from which the 
Master drew His life, and which, he has de- 
monstrated, is to-day available. This healing 
surely is an act of religion. Any one can use 
it who has the mind to, if he can get the Mind 
of Christ to heal. That is the difficulty and 
the delimiting condition of ssfvl healing. 

A deeper conviction of the i ruths of Being as 
contained in the divine consciousness than that 
of the beliefs of the carnal-mind region must 
be gained in order to overcome the apathy and 
inertia and false sense which prevent the mani- 
festation of the things of the Kingdom. The 
aim of religion is to clear away the incrusta- 
tions, so that, like the cut diamond, there may 
be the beautiful reflection of the above region 
of Truth, Love, Life, and Beauty. The op- 

57 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

position of false beliefs, cosmic, social, and per- 
sonal, which cause disease, may be overcome 
by realizing that the public opinion of God and 
the universe in favor of holiness, health, is 
much more powerful. 

From the point of advanced scientists it is 
conceded that God ought to avail to cure sick- 
ness as well as sin, and this is not surprising. 
A prominent biologist writes, "As soon as we 
realize that the aim of medicine is not to de- 
stroy the disease, but rather to stimulate the 
resisting forces of the body, the whole logic of 
therapeutics assumes a new aspect." Logically, 
as there is no life or power in matter as matter, 
and all power is of God, his position leads to 
Theotherapy. 

Why not give reasonable expectation of re- 
covery to the thousands of invalids who could 
heal themselves so far as their spiritual ability 
is concerned, were it not for the fact that they 
have been educated to believe that the power 
and love of the Father end as soon as the phy- 
sician seems to be needed? Why not see the 
incongruity of erecting hospitals and endowing 

58 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

homes for the sick and suffering while doing so 
little to destroy the causes which create their 
necessity? 

Would not our government have been ridi- 
culed if it had erected hospitals in Manila, 
Panama, and Havana, and had not used sani- 
tary engineering and preventive medicine to 
destroy the causes of disease? Without an 
efficient faith in prayer the touch of the Church 
has about as much efficacy as the King's touch 
when a hundred thousand touched Charles the 
Second, and yet never before did so many die 
of scrofula. The touch of the Christ in Chris- 
tian Science to-day is by its healing proving 
that it is re-establishing His healing work. 

Science has proved the psycho-physiological 
fact of the externalizing of mental conditions 
upon the body. Why should not the Church 
inaugurate a special campaign for clean think- 
ing of Truth and dealing with this mental 
causation, which shall etch health upon the 
body and so destroy the causes of disease at 
their source? Unclean minds externalize filth 
conditions which produce yellow fever, cholera, 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

malaria, leprosy, bubonic plague, and sexual 
diseases. A noble army of martyrs and heroes 
knew that these plagues were not sent by God. 
They externalized their health thoughts in 
standards and laws upon the filth conditions 
and upon the ascertained carriers of disease 
such as flies, mosquitoes, rats, and fleas, and 
the pestilence vanished. In the Philippines 
they abolished smallpox and reduced the 
number of lepers from five thousand to two 
thousand. The hook-worm disease, destroy- 
ing two-thirds of the natural efficiency of man, 
was easily overcome. By a knowledge of the 
realities of Being, Truth has worked to destroy 
disease through such men as Jenner, Pasteur, 
Ross, Lazaer, Reed, Carrol, Gorgas, and Ash- 
ford, and other devoted men and women. 
These higher levels must be maintained or else 
there will be a relapse to unclean carnal minds 
and the externalizing again of conditions of 
disease. No cure is infallible unless it re- 
moves the causes which make it possible, and 
this cannot be done without reckoning on 
Mental causation. Christian Science the world 
over has been successfully applying its cure- 

60 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

all and showing how to heal the whole man so 
that sickness may be eradicated and prevented. 

On a lower plane preventive measures are 
holding back pestilence; and the Church, which 
is pledged to a world campaign against sin, 
sickness, and death, and which possesses the 
most effective prophylactic, seems strangely in- 
different to its great privilege, responsibility, 
and opportunity. It seems to have a kind of 
hook-worm disease destroying its efficiency, or 
the sleeping-sickness interfering with a wide- 
awake ministry at points of need. It is not 
necessary to revert to the attitude of the 
Church in the seventeenth century, with the 
plague destroying in six months in Naples alone 
three hundred and eighty thousand lives, or 
in Europe in the fourteenth century within 
three years twenty-five million and in China 
thirteen million. To-day it has the oppor- 
tunity to begin a specific work against death, 
the last enemy to be destroyed, and to inaugu- 
rate the conditions for a new heaven and a new 
earth wherein dwelleth righteousness, and in 
which the inhabitant shall never say, "I am 

61 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

sick/' Shall the Church which must be about 
the Father's business, composed of personal 
followers of Him who said, "Suffer the little 
children to come unto me," be indifferent to 
the alleged fact that three million babies die 
within a year of their birth from diseases which 
even materia medica declares can be prevented? 
One man has wonderfully reduced the mortality 
of children in New York City by furnishing 
milk that is pure. Though a member of the 
Jewish Church, he certainly has the Spirit of 
the Christ and acts according to the Science 
of Christ's Christianity. 

Why have not the churches done more to 
save life? The wonderful healing by Christian 
Science has demonstrated the facts of the King- 
dom as now present and universal, its God- 
consciousness as available to-day as ever; 
that the real man is wholly spiritual and, as 
the likeness of God, capable of reflecting Him 
to the destruction of everything unlike Him. 
Therefore the Church, having this cure-all, and 
being an organ of Christianity, ought to obey 
the Master, whose last words were, "Go ye 
into all the world and preach the gospel to 

62 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

every creature, and these signs shall follow 
them that believe . . . they shall lay hands on 
the sick and they shall recover." And "they 
went forth and preached everywhere, the Lord 
working with them and confirming the word 
with signs following." Healing is one of the 
signs following the obedience of Christian 
Scientists. If in their infancy they are able 
to strangle serpents, what herculean tasks may 
they not accomplish in their maturity! 

That the Church may adopt this healing the 
following propositions are submitted. A sick- 
less humanity presupposes a sinless humanity. 
The children of God realizing their divine birth- 
right are free from disease. They cannot sin, 
because they are born of God. When human- 
ity ceases to think ungodlike thoughts it will 
become sinless and gain the real man's native 
freedom from sickness. The Kingdom of God 
is now here, and those who are in it cannot be 
sick, because there is no inharmony in the God- 
consciousness. All sickness has its source in 
the carnal-mind region, the false material sense 
which is enmity against God, which the Church 

63 



MUST THE CHURCH ADOPT 

is commissioned to destroy. A Christian is a 
kind of first fruits of the new humanity, a 
sample of the fruitage of Christianity, and as 
such he is certainly well. A transformed physi- 
cal life is secured only by the renewing of the 
mind to gain the Mind that was in Christ Jesus. 
The method Jesus used was entirely Theo- 
therapeutic. His command to His disciples 
to heal imposed the same obligation as that to 
preach. The test of a disciple was the doing 
of His works. Healing was one of the signs 
which indicated the Christian. It was one of 
the effects of regeneration of the heart exter- 
nalized upon the body. It was needed in the 
days of Jesus as a sign of God's presence. 
Much more is it needed in this material age to 
indicate the presence of God as Spirit, and all 
His works, including man, as spiritual. This 
healing is sacramental as an outward visible 
sign of an inward spiritual grace and Life from 
above. 

These are simply expressions of some of the 
contents of the Science of Christianity which 
are involved in healing the sick. Humanity 

64 



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE HEALING? 

must follow the example of its type, Jesus the 
Christ. If the Church would realize that it is 
the Body of which Christ is the Head, it must 
honor and obey His commands, which are to- 
day being proved to be practical measures by 
Christian Science. The understanding that 
God, who is infinite Life, Truth, and Love, is 
All-in-all ushers in the glad era of a sickless 
humanity. As one has said, "The Church in 
its cosmic relations must know the universal 
Mind, feel the infinite Love, and obey the 
absolute Good, and so individually enter into 
partnership with all souls into the divine 
Beauty, Truth, and Life, and rest in the per- 
fect Reality." 



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